
Time stands still as you pass through the gates of La Pausa.
The idyllic villa dreamt up by Gabrielle Chanel is perched high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Built in 1928 by a young architect named Robert Streitz, it was Chanel’s base in the south of France until 1953. That year, she sold La Pausa to a pair of American collectors who would later donate it to the Dallas Museum of Art, until a special opportunity for the house of Chanel to acquire La Pausa arose in 2015.

Over the ensuing decade, longtime Chanel co-conspirator Peter Marino worked under the cover of night to faithfully restore the home to its original state. After consulting a treasure trove of archival images, blueprints, receipts, letters, and other records, the architect worked with the maison’s team, including Head of Heritage Sites Hélène Fulgence to source many of the pieces Chanel had installed in the house at auction, and meticulously reproduced others to exacting detail. “When I am serious about historical restoration, I am deadly serious,” Marino shares. “We were very strict.”
“Peter really wanted it to feel like Gabrielle Chanel had just walked out of the room five minutes ago,” explains Chanel President of Arts, Culture, and Heritage Yana Peel. For her part, Peel is championing Gabrielle’s legacy by way of an impressive string of initiatives including the Next Prize, which awards contemporary artists with 100,000 euros in funding as well as mentorship; the Chanel Culture Fund, which engages in long-term partnerships with cultural institutions across the globe to create programs rooted in innovative thinking; and Chanel Connects, a podcast that brings together creatives across disciplines to connect in conversation (the fifth season, which was filmed at La Pausa, will be released later this fall).

Among these initiatives is also the restoration and stewardship of La Pausa, which will be used as a space for artists and writers to nurture and deepen their practice (later this year, the celebrated critic Merve Emre will lead a retreat). “This is very much a zone of experimentation, a laboratory of ideas, a space artists can use as a canvas they prime for their own endeavours,” adds Peel. “I hope that it will offer [them] the freedom to be audacious and to dare in a world that is full of constraints. We want to champion artists to be able to go further than they can go themselves.”
It is this cross pollination of creative minds, ones who would no doubt be friends of Chanel were she to be alive today, that will illuminate La Pausa in the years to come. To mark its grand reopening, CULTURED selects five meaningful design moments that distill the ethos of the villa—and its new chapter.

The Staircase of Chanel’s Monastic Youth
In constructing La Pausa, it’s clear that Chanel returned to the austere architecture of a youth spent in the Aubazine Abbey in Corrèze. High ceilings, sober furnishings, and cloister-inspired arches abound, and holding court in a corner of the monastic entry hall is a replica of the “monk’s staircase” found at Aubazine. (Mademoiselle Chanel sent Streitz off to Corrèze to study and photograph the original in order to reproduce it as authentically as possible.) The stairs’ beige stone, coupled with the walls’ smooth white plaster and the doorway’s sharp black lines, brings to mind Chanel’s own restrained color palette, design sensibilities, and opinions on how women should dress and be in the world.

Chanel liked to say that she ‘lived on the staircases’ while in the abbey, and it was no different at La Pausa. It was the perfect place to make an entrance and an ideal backdrop for portraits: Archival images show Salvador Dalí and Gala posing on the staircase between Mademoiselle’s cacti plants. The pair were invited by Chanel to take up residency at La Pausa between September and December of 1938 while Dalí produced work for his forthcoming show with Julien Levy in New York. The Spanish artist is one of many renowned creatives who were invited by Chanel over the years to use the home as a place to explore their practices. Others include Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy, Christian Bérard, and Luchino Visconti.

The Wood-Paneled Library
English wood oak panels line the walls of La Pausa’s library in the tradition of great Scottish castles, the inspiration for which is said to have come from Chanel’s companion, the 2nd Duke of Westminster. During the restoration the panels were gingerly removed from the walls to be sent to a workshop not far from the villa, upon which the markings from the original fabricators, Maison Jansens, were found, confirming the panels’ originality. Maison Jansens fabricated not only the wood paneling for La Pausa but library furniture as well, designing stretches of horizontal shelves that could house some 2,000 books on either side.

The Use of Symbolism
By the time Chanel came across the olive groves of La Pausa, she had built her empire, but never a home of her own. She wanted to tailor it to her sensibilities and infuse it with a sense of self; the villa would be a place where, finally, she aligned with the landscapes, sights, smells, and surrounding environment. It is not surprising, then, that the designer imbued it with her favored symbols. Just above the entrance to the home are five black iron frame windows, lined neatly in a row. Five was of course a sacred number for Chanel, who also made sure there were five tiers to the golden chandelier that hangs a few feet away. Other motifs include the surrounding cloisters’ smooth paved square stones, which evoke the classic quilted pattern of the maison, and the golden star and feather Chanel affixed above her bed, symbols which featured heavily in her 1932 Bijoux de Diamants collection.

Pops of Color in the Salon
The drawing room is one of the only places at La Pausa where color crops up, with hues of violet and dusty rose found in the carpets and sofas and contrasting the otherwise dark woods of the Baroque furniture Chanel favored. In pouring over archival materials, Marino discovered a letter written by Visconti recounting the room’s colors and floral motifs, which proved instrumental in recreating its woven Spanish and Persian rugs and plush sofas as the black and white photographs of the time cast doubt as to Chanel’s chromatic choices.
It was here that Chanel and her guests would gather after dinner—served buffet-style, Chanel was an unfussy host. They would roll up the rugs, push the furniture aside, and dance well into the evening as Misia Sert, a talented pianist and a dear friend of Chanel, sat at the Steinway.

As a host, Chanel had one rule: You didn’t have to dress up, but you had to be interesting, and interested. “You’ll see that there are no pictures on the wall; she did not collect pictures, she did not collect art—she collected artists,” says Peel. Indeed, Chanel was far more invested in creating a space for artistic exchange and experimentation than a gallery of greats.

The Untamed Gardens
If wheat was 31 rue Cambon’s emblem, lavender is La Pausa’s. At the villa, Chanel kept the doors open to let the wind bring in the herb’s hypnotic scent. The designer is said to have been among the first to properly cultivate lavender, and was particular with her gardener about a gentle maintenance schedule—she never wanted the patches to look too coiffed. Marino echoes Chanel’s predilection for wildness: “She didn’t want something that was fussy,” he says. “What appealed to her, apparently, was the natural beauty of it, not the fake planted English gardens with purple, pink, and white.” Indeed, Chanel was so taken by the landscape’s “natural” state that she instructed Streitz’s team to build around the landscape so as not to disturb it. (It is said that during construction, Jean Cocteau would stay on the property and act as a sort of guardian, keeping Chanel up to date on the progress while she attended to business in Paris). Today the terrain’s unsubdued spirit lives on, eagerly awaiting the next generation of creative renegades to inspire.